Changes were being made to required feature list less than a month before launch.

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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on October 20 that the agency has launched a "tech surge" to make improvements to the troubled Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchange website, HealthCare.gov. The move comes as President Barack Obama reportedly prepares to speak about the site's issues at an event today highlighting the ACA, frequently referred to as "Obamacare."

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius had previously blamed most of the problems experienced by citizens visiting the site on unexpected demand. But as problems have continued, the White House has grown increasingly frustrated with the site's performance. An administration official told the Washington Post that the president and others in the administration "find [the problems with HealthCare.gov] unacceptable."

While HealthCare.gov is being operated almost entirely by a team of contractors, HHS is now stepping in to take an active role in resolving the site's problems. In a blog post, an unidentified agency spokesperson wrote, "Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov."

HHS also has "tools and processes" in place to identify the choke points in the site's architecture and to prioritize how they are fixed, and the department is pushing bug fixes out during the site's off-peak hours in rolling updates. The HHS spokesperson added, "We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service."

Even with the assembling of a task force to take on the site's problems, it could take months to make all of the fixes. While public reports from HHS's chief information officer had shown the program to be on schedule, the department caused major delays early in the project by holding up the specifications for the site. And those specifications kept changing throughout the development project. According to the New York Times, HHS officials were changing the site's required features as recently as September.

Update: In a speech today, President Obama said, "Nobody's madder than me that the website isn't working as well as it should, which means it's going to get fixed." He highlighted the addition of staff to call centers supporting enrollment by phone and said that the call-in process "usually takes about 25 minutes for an individual to apply for coverage and 45 minutes for a family."

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Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat